James E. Hansen of NASA. (Credit: Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times)

The jury found that the six campaigners had “lawful excuse” because they were acting to safeguard property elsewhere around the world “in immediate need of protection” from the impacts of climate change driven in part by emissions from coal burning.

I recently wrote a post about what I call Generation E, young people around the world whose actions, or inaction, could well spell the difference between an accelerated transition to a world with abundant, renewable, non-polluting energy options and business as usual. I’m a reporter, not an editorial writer, so I’ll let you be the judge of actions that violate laws in defense of the climate. My personal sense is that there’s plenty for young people to do already within the law (and exploiting existing laws) to help be the change they seek in the world. Here are a few possibilities:

– Vote. According to one survey on youth voting by a Tufts University group, in 2004, 47 percent of citizens 18 to 24 years old voted, while 66 percent of citizens 25 and older voted. Who’ll be voting in November?
– Learn. Shape your education around engineering, science, policy, teaching or other fields that can be focused on the energy challenge underlying the climate challenge.– Engage. Whether you live in suburbia or on a college campus, you can help influence everything from zoning to energy choices. Energy audits of schools can reveal big opportunities for saving money and cutting greenhouse-gas emissions.– Create. There’s a role for — dare I say it — community organizers in shifting attitudes and actions in ways that cut energy use. And you can go into business, as well. My guess is that the next Google-style breakout success is likely to be an energy company.
What’s on your list?

I was involved in limited civil disobedience, way back in the early 1960’s. It had to do with equal access, racial justice and the like. From my own personal experience alone, not the civil rights movement overall, I had far greater success using person-to-person contact.

Perhaps because of such experience, I am not at all kindly disposed toward civil disobedience regarding greenhouse gas emissions. (At this time, that is; the future has always been frustratingly difficult to predict.) It can readily get to be like arson to protest McMansions or oversized bwanamobiles like Hummers. Thowing paint at fur coats worn by ladies displaying their wealth.

Mostly, I object to the arrogant self-righteousness of those who claim they can do no wrong because they have God or Moral Purity or whatever on their side. Such Sir Galahad types (“My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure”) arouse antagonism and render meaningful debate difficult to impossible.

We must be humble. Humility is always difficult, most of all for those of us fighting for an end to climate abuse: it is hard to be humble, when there is nothing in our cause to be humble about. But God gave us tongues, more so we could bite them than let them rattle whenever something in the brain flaps.

Good post. I’d add there’s more to political action than voting. You can knock on doors, make calls, etc.

I’d add that Gandhi and Dr. King never sat around with a bunch of world leaders in a big, fancy hotel and urged others to do that which they were not prepared to do any time or anyplace, over and over again, until the cause was won.

If Gore really believes that civil disobedience is an important strategy — then he needs to lead the effort and go chain himself to some fences and sit in front of some bulldozers with thousands of others.

Gandhi said that noncooperation with a bad law is a much a duty as cooperation with a good law.

Non-violent civil disobedience is the most effective means of changing a recalcitrant system. The key to effective civil disobedience is whether you fight to change things or you fight to punish. Both Gandhi and M.L. King have shown us that if you conduct yourself with respect and dignity but show your opponent that you will never back down, you will change minds.
If you endure insults and violence but do not yield or return their hostility, you will change minds.
If we fight to change the world and not to punish then we cannot fail and we cannot be wrong because we will welcome and respect those that hurt us and we will endure their attacks until they stop.

Your suggested actions are excellent Andy and we should all expand our role in them but when the law is wrong we should resist it without violence but with unyielding resolve!!!

Oh, and Andy, by the way, still waiting for something from you on the extraordinary solar minimum and whether that big star out there might, just might, have more to do with our climate change than the tiny CO2 slice of total greenhouse gases.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

1. He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

2. He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

3. He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

Too much of this sounds like today’s news.

If the next President fails to represent the best interest of the American People….let the revolution begin.

1. Clean Up the Mortgage Mess: U.S. buys back mortgage backed securities at a 67% discount. Refinance all mortgages, fixing their rates at no more than 5%. Eliminate all highly leveraged financial transactions, derivatives and the like.
2. Cap Interest Rates on Credit Card Debt: Massive defaults on credit card debt are the looming. Cap credit card interest at 3%, the average interest rate since the concept of paying interest for loans was first practiced.
3. Modernize Social Security: Make it fair by increasing payments to $1,500 a month for those receiving less than $1,500 a month and eliminating payments to those who do not need Social Security. Also eliminate the current cap on withholding. Increasing payments to the retired poor will immediately and permanently stimulate the economy.
4. Enact A One-Time Tax on Excess Wealth: The Reagan-Bush tax cuts for the rich were nothing but economic theft. A 50% one time tax on excess wealth (net worth in excess of $10,000,000) will help repay the theft, reduce the national debt, help pay for the mortgage mess and help stimulate the economy.
5. Eliminate the Income Tax for Individuals and Corporations: Replace the current abominable system with a tripartite system—10% on consumption (excluding food, health care and education), 10% on corporate revenue (excluding corporations with annual sales under $50,000,000) and a progressive tax on excess wealth.
6. Executive Pay: Tie remuneration to performance and eliminate stock options.
7. Financial Controls: Make the entire financial system transparent and accountable with heavy civil and criminal penalties for non-conformance.

There could be more, but this would be a good start. It is interesting that the president and many others now stress the market is not working. Wrong again. It is working, just not in the way they want it to work. Those who think unattended markets or economies are possible without massive meltdowns probably think Mother Earth is flat and evolution is a myth.

Bob Zimmerman, author of The American Challenge: Twenty-One Winning Strategies for the 21st Century.

How about a weighted voting system for issues like the environment and the economy? We’re the ones who are going to be left to deal with these messes as the old guard dies off; maybe we should have a bigger say in the policies made now that will affect our futures more than those of older Americans.

indeed cool planet is correct, and so is Dano. Young folks have been inundated with lies and power abuses from the “leaders” of this nation our grandparents and parents went to war for and supported. From the 2000 Supreme Court vendetta to put these clowns in office, all through eight years of fear, fear, fear and terror everywhere. Who beleives the gov. is keeping us safer? Shameful lying from all, repub and dems, lying or cowering, pandering or some other form of crap goverment. This pathetic and continual stream of bovine excrement we are forced to swallow is getting to be too much. Shame on the media, who actually could be doing more then civil disobedience, they could be doing their civil duty. Call these liars out! Expose the lies! Your money will not helpyou in the great bye-andbye!!!!

There’s a difference between “civil disobedience” and “breaking the law.” What Hansen defended was “breaking the law,” which realistically they only got away with because of people not wanting to go against one of the big names of AGW.

And now we have Gore, who is all talk and no action where climate is concerned, saying people should act. Gore, where are your actions? When have you taken more of a stand than urging others to do so and making a movie that the UK ruled was not allowed to be shown in their schools as an educational video?

Rainforest Action Network (and Greenpeace and others) have been doing this successfully for years. And, in fact, they did just that earlier this week at a Dominion Power plant in Virginia.

RAN’s executive director, Mike Brune, just wrote a book on this very topic: what folks can do collectively to bring about the transition — Coming Clean: Breaking America’s Addiction to Oil and Coal (//comingcleanbook.com), published by Sierra Club Books. It’s really about how we can challenge corporate America and political leaders.

Many fall under the four possibilities Andy lists here — and Brune backs them up with context and evidence that they can work.

I’m pro-life and believe every abortion ends a living human being. So, according to many of you I should be applauded if I were to chain myself to an abortion client or burn one down. Probably not, if I could be so bold as to guess.

Wake up! Even if you are radically bought into a global warming crisis, be intellectually honest. If you change the laws to allow you to act in a violent or heinous manner, expect it to come back to haunt you.

Talking about a “slice” of CO2 means (1) that you are referring to a graph, which is an abstraction of reality, and (2) that you are not using your “social” or “reasoning” mind to think about this issue. Just fill a clear balloon with air and add a small amount of blue-colored smoke, and then tell everyone what a finite air mass is and how a small amount of something can drastically change our experience.

Engineering the Earth’s atmosphere is ultimately going to resolve through dynamics of control of industrial capital, political consensus, greed, and personal will. Until we humans begin to understand the promotion of greed, and begin to appropriately reward innovation for the benefit of all mankind, we will have no purchase on this issue.

May we assume that civil disobedience can begin literally at the doorsteps of Gore and Hansen – first to assess the carbon footprints they lay down, to tell them they have no right to any excesses notwithstanding preposterous claims of being “carbon neutral”, and then literally to tear those excesses down?

Gore should have no qualms about the civil disobedient beginning to occupy Gore’s home (especially after they are foreclosed upon) to average out those footprints.

non-violent Civil Disobedience has proved effective in creating change in issues ranging from Civil Rights here in the US, to the freeing of India from Colonial rule. I see no reason why it shouldn’t be a part of the toolbox for those seeking an environmentally responsible world.

RE: “If Gore really believes that civil disobedience is an important strategy — then he needs to lead the effort and go chain himself to some fences and sit in front of some bulldozers with thousands of others.”

He also needs to directly address fair criticism of his own lifestyle. The man can’t claim to be accounting for his own excessive energy use by buying indulgences. And when there is such a thin sliver of renewable energy on the market, claiming that he’s making a difference by using huge multiples of the average American’s energy but that it’s all good because he gets it from wind is just asinine. No credible expert thinks that simply turning over to renewables is adequate. Conservation will have to be central to any effective program.

So my advice to Algore is, “Blowhard, heal thyself.”

Perhaps it would be good for some civil disobedience among those who object to his hypocrisy. It would accomplish nothing, but it would put the man back on solid ground. He could use that if he’s going to try to be effective going forward.

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.